© 2009 Max Wickert

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Max Wickert

ORPHEUS DISMEMBERED:OPERATIC MYTH GOES UNDERGROUND

© 2009 Max Wickert

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This essay first appeared in Salmagundi (No. 38/39, Summer-Fall 1977; pp. 118-136). For relatedarticles by me, see the following, all in Opera Journal:

“Librettos and Academies: Some Speculations and an Example” (VII:4 , 1974), pp. 6-16;“Bellini’s Orpheus” (IX:4, 1976), pp. 11-18; and“Che Farò Senza Euridyce: Myth and Meaning in Early Opera” (XI:1, 1978), pp. 18-35.

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ORPHEUS DISMEMBERED: OPERATIC MYTH GOES UNDERGROUND

BY MAX WICKERT

I do not believe that opera is a "culinary" pseudo-form which modifies the

established morphologies of music and drama by coyness of juxtaposition or

eccentricity of stance. It is, rather, a true genre like tragedy or the novel, and like them

it responds to the pressure of historical circumstance on collective need by elaborating

a unique constellation of images, gestures, and plots so as to create a repository of hope —

in short, a myth. The metonymic name of the operatic myth is Orpheus. "All opera is

Orpheus,"1 I writes T. W. Adorno and sees no contradiction between the paradoxical

fancifulness of this aphorism and the rigorous method he calls for in drafting a "sociology

of music." Joseph Kerman, whose ambitions are perhaps more modest, concurs. He

claims that in the myth of Orpheus "one is drawn inevitably to see . . . mirrored with a kind

of proleptic vision, the peculiar problems of the opera composer." That problem,

Kerman thinks, has something to do with "emotion and its control, the summoning of

feeling to an intensity and communicability and form which the action of life heeds and

death provisionally respects."2 It is a cliché of operatic historians that the originators of

the form would have agreed with Kerman. The direct settings of the Orpheus story by

composers of the 17th and 18th centuries, from Peri and Monteverdi, through Landi,

Rossi, Keiser, and Graun, to Gluck and Haydn, would all by themselves make a sizeable

and a representative repertory for the period.

Much can be learned from a study of these works. Some peculiar features persist

and intensify; others display an interesting tendency toward piquant metamorphoses.

How to account, for instance, for the proclivity of operatic Orpheuses to narcissistic grief,

the way they have of listening at great length to the echoes of their own laments, of praising

their lyres or the power of song when they should be praising their Eurydices, of getting

1 T. W. Adorno, “Bürgerliche Oper,” Klangfiguren (Berlin, 1959), p. 26 [my translation].

2 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York, 1956), pp. 27-28.

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stuck in the contemplation of their "affects"? Why their uncertain wavering between the

ideal of a Eurydice regained and that of a Eurydice renounced and apotheosized, a

wavering so rarely resolved in one direction or another that dei ex machinis are likely to be

needed in either case, just to bring the work to an end? Why, finally, the tendency to shift

more and more of the weight of culpability from the shoulders of the hero onto that of his

bride? Monteverdi's Eurydice follows Orpheus silently and passively until he himself

decides to turn and defy the infernal imperative. Gluck's heroine, in the next century,

importunes and ultimately overwhelms the fortitude of her husband. At last, the post-

Enlightenment Eurydice of Haydn's L'Anima del Filosofo simply tricks an unsuspecting

Orpheus by unveiling herself before he has a chance to look away. Is this drift merely

another manifestation of growing western anti-feminism or (more likely) is a process both

subtler and more complicated at work?

These are fascinating questions; they merit the attention of essays other than this

one. But even more fascinating is the fate of the Orpheus myth in opera when its overt

components disappear altogether and are replaced by covert or even "unconscious"

allusions or analogues. For the disappearance of the character Orpheus himself from the

operatic stage, together with his attendant divinities (ex machina or otherwise), is by the end

of the 18th century a fact. We may encounter him in the guise of a Tannhäuser or a Blondel

or a trovatore here and there in the 19th century, but on the whole we find that he is, as it

were, both sent underground and dismembered. As in Matthew Arnold's "Scholar

Gipsy," the fate of the myth begins to recapitulate the fate in the myth.

The way this happens is perhaps an aspect of the romantic shift from tenor to

vehicle in the use of metaphor. For an 18th century operagoer the orphic underworld may

evoke various "deadly" aspects of his reality — imprisonment and political repression,

the ineluctable Social Contract, bourgeois money, mésalliance, scientific ignorance, or

even just plain disease and death. He would feel these possibilities of signification

vibrating "behind" the manifest stage action. His 19th century counterpart would want it

the other way round. An "actual" dungeon, a plausible domestic or political tyrant, a

tangible pile of ill-gotten gold, a really beclouded fanatic, or a common case of

consumption appear on the stage and furnish him with a pretext for oscillating to the

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larger "Idea" of the myth. In either case, the myth is felt to "redeem" the concrete

exemplifications. But the operatic myth is itself a myth of "redemption." It is somehow

corroded by the unleashing of the concrete upon the operatic stage, its applicability more

and more ambivalent, displaced, fragmented, and subvertible, until the

characteristic Orphic hero himself is a spokesman no longer of passionate

affirmation, but of despairing metaphysical interrogation, like Wagner's Hans Sachs with

his "Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!" or the Rodolfo of Verdi 's Luisa Miller with his "Tutto

e mensogna, tradimento, inganno!" or finally Stravinsky/Auden's Rakewell with his "In

foolish dream, in a gloomy labyrinth I hunted shadows." All that is ultimately left of the

Orphic affirmation is the minimal orphic idea —music itself, or more precisely the audience

affect at the recognition of a returning melody. In the pages that follow, I will attempt to

trace some aspects of the beginnings of this process by examining at length two pivotal

and interrelated works, Mozart's The Magic Flute and Beethoven's Fidelio.

The Magic Flute, written in the same year (1791) as Haydn's L'Anima del Filosofo, has

a very Orphic iconography indeed. It contains one or two clearly conscious allusions to the

Orpheus story — among them the stage direction which calls for the animals of the

wilderness to assemble, enraptured, at the sound of the hero Tamino's music. There is a

descent into an underworld, a winning of the lost bride from the powers that govern it.

The prohibition against speaking to Pamina is analogous to the prohibition against

looking back at Eurydice. Pamina's response to her bridegroom's obedience to the

prohibit ion is not only psychologically and dramaturgically, but also musically

reminiscent of Eurydice's in Gluck. There is, of course, a great deal of resemblance

between Tamino's relation to the solar Sarastro and Orpheus's to Apollo. (The

bridge between Monteverdi's Apollo and Mozart's Philosopher Priest is probably the

Zoroastro of Handel's Orlando, an opera which, as Winton Dean has pointed out,3 has a

great deal in common with Mozart's.) One notes with some interest, too, that, once in his

underworld, Mozart's Tamino, like Monteverdi's Orfeo, spends a pivotal five minutes

singing in admiration of his instrument and its powers. Finally, when Tamino finds the

temple gates of Nature and Reason equally barred against him and has to choose the

3 Notes to the recording, RCA LSC-6197.

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only other alternative, a portal labeled "Wisdom," that curious scene suggests what may

be termed the epistemological void of operatic tradition, the necessity of affirming an

orphic way of knowing unsupported by those two cornerstones of Enlightenment

metaphysics — common sense (Nature) and the laws of evidence (Reason).

Yet the more obvious Tamino's apparent connection with the operatic

Orpheuses seems, the less evident is his real affinity to them. In essential ways he seems the

less Orphic, the more superficial evidence of his orphic nature one contemplates. In its

putative hero, the opera gives us all the Orphic trimmings, only obscurely to disappoint

us when it comes to the crux. Kierkegaard was the first to perceive this, and though his way

of putting it is extreme and more than a little ironical, it is worth quoting:

Tamino's flute, from which the opera takes its name, fails altogether of its

effect. And why? Because Tamino is simply not a musical figure. This is due to the

mistaken plan of the opera as a whole. Tamino becomes exceedingly tiresome and

sentimental on his flute ... and ... as a dramatic figure is entirely outside of the

musical, just as the intellectual development the play would realize is, on the whole,

a totally unmusical idea. Tamino has really come so far that the musical ceases;

therefore his flute-playing is only a time-killer, brought in to drive away thought ...

The fault in The Magic Flute is, however, that the whole opera tends toward

consciousness, and consequently its whole trend is to do away with music, while still

remaining an opera.4

Kierkegaard (or his "aesthetic" persona in Either/ Or) is unfair only inasmuch as

he assumes that, given the conception of Tamino as essentially unmusical, it necessarily

follows that the "plan of the opera as a whole" is "mistaken." In every other respect, the

Danish philosopher's insight is profoundly suggestive, for what he is above all alert to is the

absence of crisis, of failure in Tamino's behavior as a musical figure. We miss, once we

consider Tamino as an Orphic type, at least one essential feature of the Orpheus archetype:

the infraction of the infernal taboo and its consequences. This quasi-Orpheus, like the real

4 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, translated by D. & L. Swenson (New York, 1959), volume 1,pp. 81-82.

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one, is given a prohibition, but he has disturbingly little trouble in abiding by it. He

passes his test with flying colors. In this respect, he may be edifying, in the manner of, say,

Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, with whom he has much in common, but he is certainly not

only undramatic, but unoperatic. Were the Magic Flute entirely a matter of his personality

and actions, it would be no more operatic than a kind of Ascanio in Alba on a Masonic

theme. But of course there is more to this work than its hero; in fact, there is more to it

than the magic instrument of its title.

There is, for one thing, Papageno. Mozart's work is no more conceivable

without that comical, childish, grotesque side-kick of Tamino's than Don Quixote without

Sancho Panza. To return to the Kierkegaard passage, we find that its author is far from

unaware of this, though he is or pretends to be at a loss about what to do with it. "The

significance of Papageno's relation to Tamino," he writes, "looks so profound and

thoughtful that it almost becomes unthinkable for sheer thoughtfulness."5 This is

Kierkegaard's way of accusing an opera of epistemological hucksterism, and since he is

intent on other purposes he leaves the matter of Papageno's relation to Tamino

unexplored. Or almost unexplored. He does drop, in passing, one fascinating hint: "It is

so very profoundly arranged in the opera, that the flutes of Tamino and Papageno harmonize

with one another."6 He might have gone on to say that in the progress of performance,

Papageno's flute is heard first, in the opening aria of the work, so that, for all the opening-

night audience knows, it could be the magic flute announced in the title. It even is magical

inasmuch as it attracts animals, much as Orpheus's or Tamino's more dignified instruments

do, though Papageno makes use of this virtue to catch the animals and sell them.

Later on in the opera, Papageno's piping is as needful for orientation in Sarastro's

underworld as Tamino's; the two, in fact, work in tandem. Finally, Papageno's first song

clearly associates his pipe with the means for attracting (and catching) a true-love.

If we discount Papageno's clownishness, his evidently low-mimetic stature in the

hierarchy of the dramatis personae, and examine him with coldly classificatory logic, we find he

5 Kierkegaard, p. 78.

6 Kierkegaard, p. 81.

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is as "orphic" as his master, and in some ways more so. Orpheus, in the first place,

classically does not have a flute, but a lyre or lute or harp. Papageno's flute, we quickly

learn in the opera, is not magic at all and he retains it only, as it were, in his Tamino-

aspect. What he does receive in the course of the action is not, to be sure, a magic lyre,

but a magic glockenspiel, which is close enough. As any classicist knows, there are

ancient, profound overtones to the flute-lyre opposition. The two instruments are

repeatedly pitted against each other in musical contests of Greek myth, paradigmatically

in the one between Marsyas and Apollo. The lyre-playing Apollo defeats his opponent

because his lyre allows him to sing while playing. And Orpheus is above all a singer and

to that extent Apollonian. Needless to say, in The Magic Flute, Papageno is the one who

can sing and play simultaneously; he does so, very charmingly, on two occasions, and is

both times rewarded with the arrival of his "Eurydice". (It is a little droll to contemplate

the fact that when Tamino plays his flute, the person who arrives is, at least on one

occasion, Papageno!). But the most significant Orphic feature in Papageno is precisely

the one missing in Tamino: he breaks the prohibition, loses his bride, is ready (like Gluck's

or Haydn's Orfeo) to kill himself, and is made finally happy by ex machina intervention.

So much for cold classificatory logic. We do not, of course, for a moment take

Papageno seriously as an Orphic figure. One reason is that, unlike his master, he lacks a

capacity for metaphysical suffering. His conception of anguish is circumscribed by

hunger, thirst, sexual need, and what the transactional analysts call insufficient stroking.

The ethos of the opera clearly forbids the conception of Orpheus as an homme moyen

sensuel; yet, paradoxically, it presents such a figure and even endears him to us rather as

though Shakespeare were to roll drunken Trinculo, birdlike Ariel, and monstrous

Caliban into one. What is more, Papageno has the last word, for he gets his Papagena after

Tamino has already been united with his Pamina, thus necessitating two finales, and

occasioning much talk of anticlimax among the work's more hide-bound critics (among

them the film-maker Ingmar Bergman, who thought he knew better than Mozart and

reshuffled the scenes).

One thing is clear: in the context of The Magic Flute, the figure of Papageno is

literally irrepressible. Perhaps we should see the figure of Tamino as an embodiment of the

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forces that, unsuccessfully, attempt to repress him. Mozart (is this what Kierkegaard

obscurely senses?) desperately wants to make Tamino a repository of ultimate meaning,

and he works within a tradition which associates such ultimate meaning (initiation) with

the figure of Orpheus. But he can accommodate him only in the context of Papageno's equal

assertiveness, which seems rather like the assertiveness of a wish that the "ultimate" be

deprived of its special, its aristocratic status. Edward Dent points out that there is

something of a mystery about Mozart taking on this particular project: "It is difficult to

imagine what thought led him to do so. It was hardly dignified for a musician who had been

constantly associated with court life at Vienna ... to undertake to collaborate in a fairy play

to be acted in what was little more than a wooden barn, to an audience that cared only for

the trivial and vulgar"7—an audience, in other words, responsive mainly to Papageno.

We should perhaps see the magic of The Magic Flute as the result of an uneasy

compromise between the composer and that audience. The deeper needs of that

audience are satisfied by the attribution of the Orphic myth's chief structural features to

Papageno, while on the surface that myth's characteristic affect is displaced onto the

story of Tamino. There is even a disquieting fantasy undercurrent in the work which makes

Papageno the "real" rescuer of Pamina. It is he who sees her first, who removes her

from the clutches of the vile Monostatos, who leads her back to Tamino on at least

one occasion, whose suicide attempt is carefully paralleled to hers, and who, for that

matter, spends more time in her company than her ultimate bridegroom. The duet "Bei

Männern welche Liebe fühlen," easily imaginable as a hero-heroine vaudeville at the end of an

Abduction from the Seraglio or a Finta Giardiniera, is in this opera sung by the heroine and

Papageno. At any rate, there is something touching in the story that Mozart on his death

bed, unable to attend any more performances of the work, had a friend sing to him,

several times, not Tamino's "Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön" or "Wie schön ist doch

dein Zauberton", not Sarastro's "In diesen teuren Hallen", not even the sublime flute and

timpani march by which Tamino and Pamina pass through the Valley of the Shadow of

Death, but Papageno's opening song. Mozart's loftiest ideals went into Tamino, but he

identified with Papageno.

7 Edward J. Dent, Mozart’s Operas (London, 1913), p. 211.

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Papageno is at his least Orphic when he talks; and he is loquacious to the point of

silliness. It is talking to, rather than looking at, Eurydice which the underworld of his

opera forbids. The wedge driven between word and melody mirrored in the theory of

Rousseau is in the practice of this opera near-absolute. Is Papageno perhaps an

embodiment of Rousseau's sense that once music and language coexist, as they must

both in opera and in a lyre-playing Orpheus, there is an ineluctable false note, a "flaw" that

"cannot be removed"?8 It certainly seems so; and we may conclude our discussion of

Mozart's work with a meditation upon Papageno as a representation of a pervasive fear

of language.

We find the first hint in Papageno's very name. Dent notes that this name, with its

Italianate ending, should "be pronounced as in Italian ... with a soft g, although the current

practice in Germany is to pronounce the g hard."9 The great scholar is here misled by

philology, or rather not led far enough. As any German could have told him, the name is

an obvious cognate of the most common German name for 'parrot' (Papagei),

etymologically related to the English 'popinjay'. "Nyghtengales syngand, and

papeiayes spekand," the OED quotes Mandeville, and there we have one of Mozart's

primary intentions in a nutshell.10 We remember the almost Protestant suggestion in

Rousseau that music, referring itself for verification only to the inner light of the listener's

subjective feelings, cannot deceive. The corollary of that position is that language, with

its capacity of referring to things the subject has never experienced, not only can, but

inevitably does deceive - and that its plausibility, its association with "truth" derives only

from conventional repetition, in other words from "parroting". Language, from an

Orphic perspective, is infantile echolalia — and in The Magic Flute this position is not

only illustrated, but compounded with the opera's strong streak of anti-feminism, at

8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionary of Music, translated by Ulrich Weisstein, in: UlrichWeisstein, The Essence of Opera (New York, 1964), pp. 82-90 passim.

9 Dent, p. 220 n.

10 This does not rule out a possibly half-conscious Latinate pseudo-etymology: Papa-geno,‘father-begotten’. This is, however, ironical, since Papageno is patently a momma’s boy; atone point he even wishes he were a girl.

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the point where Tamino admonishes Papageno that what the latter believes is "Geschwätz

von Weibern nachgesagt" ("tittle-tattle parroted by women"). In the very next line, Tamino

uses a form of the German language's strongest word for deception (heucheln), a word so

strong in sinister epistemological overtones that he had used it once before (the only time it

occurs in the opera) to cry out at the total collapse of all his values as he enters the

underworld of the Temple of Wisdom: "So ist denn alles Heuchelei!"

Papageno then embodies a naive faith in the adequacy of language —an infantile

belief that the syllables stammered at the breast, the "mother tongue", can be escalated into a

true language of feeling. The concept of feeling is the crucial differential here. Dent, to

quote him once more, contemplates with some surprise that in this remarkable work "hero

and heroine have no more than one solo aria apiece!"11 It is one of the virtues of the opera's

unjustly maligned libretto that the texts of these two arias, separated by the bulk of the

work, are in beautiful and certainly conscious balance. And the obvious keynote in both

is the word fühlen (to feel).

Tamino: . . .

Ich fühl es, ich fühl es,

Wie dies Götterbild

mein Herz mit neuer Regung füllt. (Act I, no. 3)

Pamina:

Ach, ich fühl’s, es ist verschwunden,

ewig hin der Liebe Glück!

Nimmer kommt ihr, Wonnestunden

meinem Herzen mehr zurück.

(Act II, no. 17)

(The symmetry of the two arias is accented by other key-words in both Herz, Liebe,

allein, ewig). Tamino's aria specifically associates feeling" with the linguistically

inexpressible ("Dies etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen"), and Pamina's outburst is occasioned by

the refusal of Tamino to speak. She takes that refusal as evidence of the cessation of his

11 Dent, p. 219.

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"feeling" for her ("fühlst du nicht der Liebe Sehnen"), while he has learned that, on the contrary,

it is speaking that would invalidate his desire. In the background of both scenes is

Papageno, silenced against his will in the first, and merrily prattling away in the second.

For his part, Papageno never uses the word fühlen at all in the opera except once, when

it is fed to him by Pamina ("Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen").

We are thus dealing with a distrust not so much of the capacity of language in

general, as of its adequacy to the world of desire. But Papageno is given desire, and what

is more, he attains its object. The moment of that attainment has other features of

interest besides its obvious structural similarity to Pamina's. Like Pamina, Papageno is

desolate and ready to do away with himself. As with Pamina, the three fairy genii appear to

dissuade him (shadows of the old Orphic deus ex machina). At their urging Papageno

remembers his magic bells, and when he plays them his Papagena finally appears. The

ensuing duet, charming to the point of fatuity, has the two bird-humans literally

parroting each other for five minutes. They stammer the syllable Pa- at least sixty times,

and then launch into a stretto over half of which consists of iterations of each other's

names. Papagena, of course, as the priest of Isis had promised earlier, reproduces her

husband's appearance in every detail except sex (and vocal timbre), and they sing of

reproducing each other in the form of legitimately conceived offspring — a large

Catholic family, one can be sure, is being launched here. Kierkegaard dismissed the

scene with amused contempt: "The fate of the actual Papageno need not concern us. We

wish him happiness with his little Papagena, and we willingly permit him to seek his

happiness in populating a primitive forest or an entire continent with nothing but

Papagenos."12 The scene is an epitome of the ethos of reproduction — infantile in both the

linguistic and the sociological sense — and the shower of babies it envisions is an

ambiguous blessing. Still, Mozart forces us, or was forced by what he shared with the

popular audience of Schikaneder's theater, to accept it uncritically and even with delight. His

opera needs to accommodate an anti-Orpheus whose desire is as organic and as

commonplace as the warbling of birds and the copulation of the masses.

12 Kierkegaard, p. 82.

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But the opera more than hints that this accommodation is the sign also of a

secret fear, the fear that desire in all its aspects is featureless and undifferentiated. The classic

Orpheus cannot endure even the possibility of such a state of affairs. "Ché farò senz'

Eurydice?" he sings: life without the particular and unique form of desire he imagines is

unbearable. His music is the do-or-die means for keeping that vision alive. And yet the

classic Orpheus is a narcissist, too — at least his proclivity for confounding his

gift with his need, his lyre with his bride, his lament with his loss. The very intensity with

which he wants to give his desire for a special woman a privileged status has a

tendency to make him e na mo re d , no t s o m uc h o f tha t wo ma n , b u t o f h i s

s ong . Counterbalancing this classical Orpheus in The Magic Flute is that parody

Orpheus, Papageno, de-individuated as far as his humanity will permit, announcing

from the outset that his desire is undifferentiated, that one good-looking woman will

do as well as another. He needs no image, no bezaubernd schönes Bildnis, to convince

him of his yearning. And he accepts with the naive delight of a child getting a

birthday surprise the fact that, when his yearning is given an object, that object is a

narcissistic reproduction of himself, feathers and all. It is perfectly fitting, too, that she

should first appear to him in a shape quite unlike his own, that of the archetypal carlene

crone, and that he should both accept and reject her in the guise (he says yes, but crosses

his fingers behind his back). One of the sublimely trivial quibbles in the libretto of the

work (so trivial that Mozart did not bother to set it to music) occurs when Papageno is first

promised his bride:

Papageno:

Und worm bestehen diese Prüfungen?

2nd Priest:

Dich allen unseren Gesetzen zu unterwerfen, selbst den Tod nicht zu scheuen.

Papageno:

Ich bleibe ledig!

2nd Priest:

Aber wenn du dir ein tugendhaftes, schönes Mädchen erringen könntest, das an

Farbe and Kleidung dir ganz gleich wäre?

Papageno:

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Mir ganz gleich . . . Mir ganz gleich!?

(Act II, scene 1)

The passage does not translate well, for the German word "gleich" means both

"similar to" and "a matter of indifference to". But then in E ng l i s h , too, "sameness" is ,

at least by a trick of etymology, "indifference." Papageno needs only to be paid the

indirect compliment of hearing, in the next sentence, that his promised simulacrum is

both young and beautiful, and he thinks that life is worth risking for her, for it, for

himself.

So the pseudo-Orphic Papageno is prepared to undergo the descent with his

master, the quasi-Orphic Tamino. And what, one might well ask, do they both

descend into? A peculiar underworld, to be sure; an underworld only in the theatrical

sense, but an overworld in the ethical. That the ascent into enlightenment must

look like a descent into darkness is perhaps a commonplace of religion and fiction;

still, since Tamino and Papageno work at such meta-physical cross-purposes and yet

are both repositories of Orphic motifs, one is tempted to see a more unique paradox in

the fact that this dual Orpheus descends not from the pastoral civilization of Thrace

into the barbaric demonism of Hades, but from the emotional violence of the

Queen of the Night's territory into the realm of the philosopher-king Sarastro. The

chorus of furies is on the wrong side of the gate. Tamino / Papageno's descent is a

descent into culture. We must leave to one side a consideration of the question whether,

when Tamino exclaims at the gate of that underworld, "So ist denn alles Heuchelei!" his

might not be the dawning voice of what a later age was to call the Social Lie. At any rate,

the stage is set for a dramatic connection between the darkness into which Orpheus

descends and the forces of social and political repression, a connection which powerfully

emerges in Beethoven's Fidelio, however far the Orpheus myth in that work retreats

into a latent rather than manifest layer of signification.

Early in his career Beethoven (though the fact is little known) seems to have

given the Orpheus myth a more or less direct treatment. The occasion was a

commission from the Italian dancer Salvatore Vigano for music to a ballet entitled The

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Creatures of Prometheus.13 Though the complete scenario of that ballet has been lost, we

know enough about it from the program outline that survives to dispose of the

assumption that its plot had any Aeschylean overtones. No mention seems to have been

made of Prometheus's torment—and at any rate any romantic associations of

Beethoven's "titanism" with the presumed content of the work are immediately

dispelled by listening to its music. On the contrary, Prometheus appears in it as a

serenely tutelary figure rather like, one would imagine, Mozart's Sarastro.14 The main

agents are a pair of statues-come-to-life, presumably a man and a woman, whom

Prometheus initiates into the mysteries of Apollo. The most revealing sentence of the

outline declares that these two figures "through the power of harmony are made

sensitive to the passions of human existence."15 A key role in that education is

taken by Orpheus who appears not only in his own form but in those of his analogues,

Amphion and Arion. It is clear from this that Beethoven at the beginning of his

creative life was no stranger to the allegorical habits of thought the Orphic legend

tended to nurture, and which tended to give it a twist in the direction of what we

have already observed in The Magic Flute.

But Beethoven's aristocratic entertainment of 1801 is a far cry from the

almost Jacobin opera he began four years later, the most striking feature of which is

its almost totally unallegorical topicality. Whatever myths operate in Fidelio have been

pushed below a surface that is as resolutely contemporary as the Viennese censorship

of the time would allow. Given this, it is rather baffling to contemplate Fidelio's

profound emotional kinship to, precisely, The Magic Flute. The similarity of evocation

13 Vigano worked under the famous ballet master Gasparo Angiolini who, through hisconnections with Gluck and “Reform Opera,” illustrates the inextricable interweaving ofoperatic and balletic traditions, leading all the way back through Lully to the simultaneousorigin of both genres in the sixteenth century.

14 Dent (p. 258) ventures a direct connection: “The final chorus [of The Magic Flute] may wellhave suggested the theme in Prometheus which afterwards became famous through itsemployment for a great set of pianoforte variations and for the last movement of the EroicaSymphony.

15 Cited by Philip Ramey, liner notes to the recording , Columbia M30082.

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between those two totally different works has, of course, been much noted, though the

reasons given for it have not often supported close examination. The musicological

formalists have sought it in some label like Singspiel or "Viennese classical style". But

Weber's Oberon, derived from the same source as, and very similar in plot to, The Magic

Flute, a work whose form is certainly that of the Singspiel, has virtually no resemblance

to Mozart's opera beyond the obvious. Mozart's own Viennese classicism produced

other operas, and yet one of the greatest Mozart critics has stated flatly that "Die

Zauberflöte stands much closer to Fidelio than it does to Don Giovanni or Cosi Fan Tutte.16 16

The fact is that formalist considerations cannot quite define and certainly do not

invariably determine affinities. In this case the relationship between the two works is

both more direct and more profound.

It is Dent, exquisitely sensitive to the scores of the two works, who comes closest

to accounting for it, though, intent only on Mozart, he leaves the question hanging.

He notes that there are motivic reminiscences of the earlier opera in the later which

seem to establish relationships not so much between their atmospheres as between their

characters. "Pizarro as a singing character, " says Dent, "might be the son of the

Queen of the Night by Monostatos. In the duet between Pizarro and Rocco we

are often reminded of Monostatos and Papageno; the most curious reminiscence

is the resemblance between the duet for Florestan and Leonora (after she has rescued

him) and that for Papageno and Papagena." 17 Dent might have added that the tones of Don

Fernando are clearly those of Sarastro, that Pizarro is dispatched in a swift musical

figure not unlike those that accompany the final disappearance of the Queen of the

Night, and that Fidelio and Rocco's duet near the conclusion of Act One more than

once conjures up the initial meeting of Pamina and Papageno. Dent quite

appropriately finds these reminiscences "curious"; his use of the word indicates

precisely how much and how little this kind of motif-hunting can accomplish. It can

show that in the Magic Flute echoes are pervasive enough to form textures that, though

scarcely conscious, cannot be matters of mere accidental reminiscence. And yet it

16 Dent, p. 259.

17 Ibid.

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cannot account for their meaning because, instance by instance, the parallels have a

dreamlike, displaced oddity which disappears once either work is viewed as a whole.

The snivelling and lecherous underling, Monostatos, somehow becomes the sinister and

inquisitorial Pizarro; the coloratura Queen of the Night is transmogrified into a

dramatic bass and also assimilated in Pizarro; the silly monogamous twittering of the

Papagenes turns into the ecstatically sublime spousal hymn of the Florestans; the

agile harlequinade of Papageno himself reappears as the clumsy good-heartedness of

the jailer Rocco. Cumulatively the effect is the distortion and reintegration of an entire

associative context—in short the transformation of a myth.

If we take, for a minute, a more abstract approach we might remind ourselves of

the more obvious structural similarities of the two works. We might take as a hallmark

of that similarity the almost identical way in which the two central pairs of lovers greet

their ultimate delivery. Tamino and Pamina sing:

Ihr Götter, welch ein Augenblick!

Bewahret ist uns Isis Glück!

and the words of Leonora and Florestan at the analogous moment in Fidelio are

almost certainly a conscious echo:

0 Gott, welch ein Augenblick!

0 unaussprechlich süsses Glück!

Working backward from these culminating moments, we see that they are

brought about by similar patterns, differentiated in only one important way: in The

Magic Flute the man descends to redeem the woman, while in Fidelio it is the other way

around. The former has affinities with the myth of Orpheus, the latter with that of

Alcestis. It should not surprise us that the two themes have displayed a conscious

reciprocity since the beginning of opera. The connection has the sanction of

antiquity: both Orpheus and Admetus are well-known protégés of the Paean

Apollo and there are several references to Orpheus in Euripides's Alcestis. There are

almost as many operatic Alcestes as there are Orfeos. By the time we reach the work of

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Gluck, the setting of the one seems almost to necessitate the setting of the other.

Interestingly enough, the Italian tradition seems to put Orpheus in the foreground and

Alceste in the background, while the French tends toward the reverse. Genetically,

Beethoven's Fidelio is of course best understood as an offspring of the French line

which reaches back through Cherubini's Les Deux Journées to Gluck's and

ultimately to Lully's Alceste. Especially after the French Revolution, the fashion for what

has come to be called "rescue opera" tends to gravitate toward the theme of heroic,

self-sacrificing wifeliness. Bouilly's Lenore, ou L’Amour Conjugal, the paradigm of the

genre, was set by at least three composers before Beethoven and his collaborators

turned it into Fidelio. This much is an obvious and much repeated fact of operatic

history. What is less obvious is that in examples of rescue opera where the final

redemption is accomplished by a man rather than a woman, feminine agency seems to

be replaced by musical agency. Grêtry's extraordinarily influential Richard Coeur-de-

Léon culminates in a scene during which the imprisoned hero is liberated by recognizing

the melody his minstrel Blondel plays outside his dungeon. Blondel is thus more than

faintly Orphic and only the love-interest is missing to make him completely so.

Grêtry's opera, at any rate, is a representative instance of a popular genre in which

the moment of deliverance is signaled by some kind of on-stage music, where

anagnorisis hinges on the recognition not of a person but of a melody. The

allegorical Orpheus, totally identified with the power of music, appears disguised as a

human serenader with a signature tune. His appearance in serious musical drama has

indeed been prepared for by centuries of comic operas in which the romantic

serenader (e.g. Paisiello's Almaviva or the Belmonte of Mozart's Entführung aus dem

Serail) "rescues" his bride from the "underworld" of bourgeois money or oriental

tyranny.

The two strands of rescue opera—Orphic and Alcestian— are both present in

Fidelio: on one hand the heroic wife who braves death for the sake of a husband, on the

other the signaling of the moment of release by a piece of on-stage (or back-stage) music,

in this case a trumpet fanfare, which the opera has trained both its audience and its

dramatis personae to "recognize". The full power of that trumpet call in Fidelio, its

obscurely urgent suggestion that here is the work's center of meaning, has been felt by

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all who have heard it in performance. That Beethoven himself intended that centrality is

shown by the fact that three of the four gigantic overtures he wrote for the opera use that

theme for a structural pivot. Yet the fanfare, Orphic in derivation, has curiously no

direct connection with either the hero or the heroine of the plot—in fact, it is one of

Fidelio's most satisfying ironies that it is arranged for by the villain of the piece, who

then finds his evil designs foiled by it. The importance of that emancipation of music as a

dramatic agent from the human cast of characters seems to me far-reaching indeed.

Wagner's capacity to give certain Leitmotives something approaching an independent

theatrical personality is inconceivable without it.

That emancipation facilitates one other transformation. It removes, at least

temporarily, the shadow of narcissism from the mechanics of the Orphic plot. An Orphic

hero completely dissociated from the Orphic song is in no danger of confounding the

song with the bride. He will not at any rate sing long monologues in praise of his lyre or

demand from echo a reproduction of his own laments. The bride herself can thus cease to

be an image and become a real agent. Here again one is reminded of the dynamics of The

Magic Flute in which Tamino is catapulted into action by an image (a portrait, in fact) but

can complete his rescue only when Pamina, whom he wants to lead out of the

underworld, turns around at the crucial moment to lead him. "Ich selber führe dich,"

Pamina says during the final crisis of Mozart's opera—and Tamino, playing his magic

flute, brings up the rear. Beethoven merely goes a step further, taking the magic flute out of

both of their hands and extending female initiative to the beginnings of the story.

Eurydice/ Admetus becomes Orpheus/ Alcestis, and the affective overtones of all the other

characters rescramble themselves. It is a perfect, if revolutionary answer to the suspicion of

feminine agency which can be seen developing from Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice to Haydn's

Anima del Filosofo. Beethoven in fact, at the peak of his Act II prison duet, quotes a well-

known musical phrase from Gluck's opera:

Orfeo ed Eurydice:

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Eu—r---di----ce! Eu –ry—di------ce! Eu—ry---di-- ce! Eu--- ry----di--ce!

Fidelio:

Le—on—no--re! Flo—re---stan! O Le—o---no----re! Flo----------re----stan!

The citation has the force of rebuttal. Orfeo's self-absorbed iteration of the name

"Eurydice" splits back into a partnership of mutual passionate address, an exchange of

names.

In Fidelio, then, we encounter a fragmentation and displacement of the Orpheus

myth consistent with, but more radical than, the one in The Magic Flute. All the features

are present. There is an interrupted marriage--but rather than the rape of the bride by

an underworld principle, benign or malign, it involves the spiriting away of the groom.

There is an underworld, but not a supernatural one. (Scholars tell us that the dungeon

scenes of French rescue opera developed directly "from the enfer scenes... which ran

through French opera from its beginnings."18) There is an Orphic savior, but he has

changed sex—a mutation which the ambiguous transvestitism of two centuries of

operatic castrati and of sopranos in breeches has prepared for. There is an infernal

prohibition, though it is no longer "Do not look back!" or even "Do not speak!" but "Do

not reveal yourself!" Finally there is deliverance through music, even though it appears as

severed from the real body of Orpheus as the head which floated to Lesbos. Changing the

sex of the Orphic deliverer is almost Euripidean in implication--and as so often in

Euripides, the myth is revitalized in the act of its ironic or humanistic dismemberment.

One effect of that revitalization is the possibility of a convincing happy ending. This is

surely related to what I have called the suppression of Orphic narcissism. It is as if

Beethoven had converted the latent hopelessness of the myth into hope by flying in the

18 Patrick J. Smith, The Tenth Muse (New York, 1970), p. 182.

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teeth of it—an act perfectly illustrative of the ethical meliorism of the composer's post-

Revolutionary generation.

Yet it would be precipitous to conclude that the essential irrationalism of

opera has here been for a moment suspended—that no sense of epistemological crisis lurks

behind the rational morality of this drama. On the contrary, bursting the shackles of a

self-contained symbolism only seems to open the way to a more direct reflection of

"reality." By severing the figure of Orpheus from the liberating music, Beethoven opens the

door to a profounder absurdity. The trumpet call that sets Florestan free is a function

of capricious and arbitrary theatrical timing. Had Don Fernando arrived a minute later,

both the Florestans would probably have perished, however heroically. The fanfare is no

more and no less opportune than the cavalry charges in American Westerns—and yet the

symbolic weight it is given deflects all attention from its fortuitous character. The

culmination is, once more, ex machina; we are swept along into accepting it by a very

spurious act of assent. For this reason the libretto's piously repetitive affirmation of

"Providence" makes some of us uncomfortable. We cannot ultimately tell the difference

between providence and coincidence. Fidelio opens the way to the many nineteenth

century operas that seem particularly prone to confuse destiny with adventitiousness:

Verdi's La Forza del Destino, which might just as well be entitled La Forza della

Coincidenza, is a representative example of the type. The faith in the transcendence of a

world of tyrannical caprice on the human plane is purchased in Fidelio by a hidden

acquiescence in its immanence on the ontological plane.

Not unrelated to this, and in some ways even more problematical, is another

implication of alienating the Orphic hero entirely from the Orphic means of release, an

implication we catch best by contemplating the relation of the opera's subject to its

composer. That relation seems to me pretty thoroughly compensatory. Beethoven, the

author of the Heiligenstadt Testament, the self-created tragic bachelor, fixes, in composing

his only opera, on the subject of connubial bliss. One day, some years after its completion,

Beethoven had a female visitor. It was Countess Giulia Gallenberg, the object of

Beethoven's passionate wooing years earlier, identified by some biographers with

the mysterious Unsterbliche Geliebte. She had either jilted him or had failed in the strength of

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will needed to resist her father's choice of a more suitable match. Now she regretted it.

"After her arrival in Vienna," the composer confided to his friend Schindler, "she

sought me out, dissolved in tears. But I spurned her." Schindler, apparently puzzled by

the harshness of Beethoven's attitude, probed further, hinting that the composer had the

opportunities of a Hercules at the crossroads. Beethoven's reply was severe: "Had I

thus surrendered the force of my life to living, what would have been left for the noble

better part of me?"19 The "noble better part" is clearly art, and the statement implies, it seems,

not so much a judgment specifically against the unfortunate Giulia, but an axiomatic

dismissal of the compatibility of an artistic vocation with the ordinary happiness

represented by marriage. The transformation of reality through music to which Beethoven

dedicated himself implied a radical askesis — and yet Beethoven writes an opera in which, on

the surface, reality is transformed specifically by the opposite of askesis, that is, by "eheliche

Liebe" — passionate conjugality. It is that crucial, arbitrary trumpet call only that remains

Beethoven's own property, his way of having his cake and eating it too. It must be left an

open question whether we have here the tragic arrogance of the bourgeois artist,

determined to monopolize transcendence by taking the harp or trump of Orpheus the

musician out of the hands of Orpheus the husbandman, or whether with a profound

unconscious humility Beethoven restores to ordinary human fidelity the honor

usually accorded to "genius" by making sure that no musical instrument is found on

the premises when the shadow of tyranny is dispelled.

There is more than a hint of pessimism in all this — and indeed, moving as the

conclusion of Fidelio is, it is not to most listeners of the work the moment they remember

best. What sticks in the memory is the scene that greets us at the opening of Act II: the

unrelieved, unrelievable gloom of an imprisoning lower depths out of which issues, like

a hopeless scream, Florestan's "Gott! welch Dunkel hier!" Verdi, at any rate, seems to have

heard Fidelio in this way, for when, a generation after it, he wrote I Due Foscari, in many

ways his darkest opera, he included a prison scene quite clearly modeled on Beethoven's.

There too the faithful wife descends into her husband's dungeon. But this epigone of

Leonora has not a chance of success, and he knew it. "At one moment," to quote the

19 Paul Nettle, Beethoven und seine Zeit (Frankfurt, 1958), p. 107 [my translation].

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summary of a recent Verdi critic, "the lighthearted song of the gondoliers is heard in the

distance, and for a few bars Lucrezia sings in unison with them, ironically remembering the

world of happiness and freedom."20 In the song of the gondoliers we have a Verdian

version of Orpheus as back-stage music. The setting now is Venice, both the birthplace

of opera and the "tote Stadt" of future symbolists. Verdi has sent Orpheus and

Eurydice back to their beginnings to brood on the impotence of their myth.

For the opera composer of the 19th century, that impotence comes to have

something to do with an essential split in Orpheus's nature. Orpheus is both regal and

musical. If his musicality makes him lord of all things in the world of day, it renders

him a suppliant in the underworld. The more his musical aspect is humanized, the

less aristocratic he becomes; the more his aristocratic aspect is humanized, the less

musical. But at the core of the myth is the single, the irreplaceable object of desire,

Eurydice — and only privilege has the power to insist on a privileged object of desire.

Mozart confronted this contradiction by splitting his Orpheus in two, letting a

"proletarian" pseudo-Orpheus supply the element of common humanity missing in his

aristocratic quasi-Orpheus. He gives — one is tempted to say, for the last time — a positive

articulation to the myth by letting them walk together as a double image. After him,

attempts to re-unify the image founder on the opposition between music and power,

producing at best an anti-Orpheus, more often than not malign. The Duke of Mantua in

Verdi's Rigoletto is such a figure, as is Barnaba, the cantastorie of Ponchielli's La Gioconda.

Arrigo Boitò, the librettist of the latter, seems to have felt this problem acutely; in his

work, music and tyranny coalesce in a problematical thematic fusion. Both Iago and

Mefistofele, as he conceives them, are crypto-Orphic, and in his most ambitious

work, Nerone, he consciously combines the features of Orpheus with those of the

Roman arch-despot.

The alternative is Beethoven's way in Fidelio: divorcing musical agency from

human power altogether through the device of the signature theme, the fanfare of

release — a disembodied Orpheus signaling redemption. This too is, as we have

20 Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of Verdi (New York, 1970), p. 103.

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seen, not without its problems. For it is impossible to disembody Orpheus

altogether. Lacking an epiphany among the cast of characters, the audience seeks him

out in the power that moves the work, that is, the composer. Richard Wagner was

to shoulder the burden of this election squarely by making the signature theme into a

programmatic element of both his dramatic and his compositional style. But in him

the dialectic between the fantasies of power and of musicality reaches a crisis-point. He

can no longer be the redeeming Orpheus of Monteverdi who leads the Eurydice of

popular fantasy into a bright Platonic day. Nor can he be the romantic anti-

Orpheus, the demonic pied piper followed by the vulgar. ("A people frantic for a

fiddler!"21 was Byron's aristocratically scornful assessment of Rossini's success.) He is

forced to become the coercive leitmotivist, the trumpeter of a musical Führerprinzip,

compensating for the dearth of personalities in his work by the insistent, predictable

thumping of recurrent melodic shreds. Power, yes; and musicality, yes but

dehumanized. It is a tragic irony of Wagner's career that his cultivation of Orpheus's

ghost — the audience's shock of recognition at the reappearance of musical material —

leads him into a complexity of musical articulation so thoroughgoing that the logical

next step is Schoenbergian dodecaphony, a system in which the return of musical

material is so total as to make the shock of recognition ubiquitous, which is to say,

impossible. The modernist extension of the Orpheus myth in opera is for it to become

a repository not so much of "hope" but (as in Dallapiccola's twelve-tone opera, Il

Prigioniero) of "torture through hope."

21 Letter to J.C. Hobhouse, 17 May 1819.